Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Oluwaseyi Sosanya, Co Founder and CEO of Gravity Sketch:
Q: This is the first time we have spoken. Can you provide a brief overview of Gravity Sketch?
A: At Gravity Sketch, we’re on a mission to revolutionize the way people bring ideas to life and fundamentally change the way 3D design is done today. We are creating a suite of connected 3D products designed from the ground up for intuitive creation and collaboration. Our company is looking to do what Adobe did for 2D, for the 3D world – in doing so we’re targeting a total addressable market of $10bn. See here for a short video of Gravity Sketch in action, and a short video of user testimonials from our flagship customer Ford.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your services?
A: Gravity Sketch is a VR/AR product design and collaboration platform that allows design and engineering teams to create, collaborate, and review in an entirely new way from anywhere in the world. The software is being used by design studios at the likes of Ford, Nissan, and Reebok, alongside over 60 universities and over 50,000 creative professionals across the world as a key part of their design workflow.
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Q: Who would be your ideal user and why?
A: Initially, Gravity Sketch was targeted at design teams in the automotive industry; it’s now being used much more broadly, including across transportation design, industrial design, footwear, and media & entertainment.
All of these industries have a real need for design communication and collaboration. The key value propositions we offer these industries are:
○ Up to 90% reduction in design time and costs
○ Ease of communication with the team, clients, and manufacturers
○ Direct output from Gravity Sketch to CAD
○ Early involvement of engineering, marketing and management in design decisions
○ A reduction in the amount of physical modelling required
○ More iterations in less time, leading to a better designed product in shorter timescales
Q: What makes Gravity Sketch unique in the market?
A: Our focus is on a simple and extremely intuitive user experience that allows designers to sketch and model directly in 3D, which significantly reduces the time to go from idea to a 3D sketch. The 3D data can then be exported to CAD, where technicians can focus on realising a precise 3D model instead of building one from scratch using rough 2D sketches as a reference. In addition, with the recent development of our Co-Creation product, Gravity Sketch is the only creation tool on the market which also enables real-time collaboration between multiple stakeholders in different locations. Engineers can now set boundaries based on safety or technical constraints and work with designers from the start to find compromises between design and engineering needs, while management and marketing can engage and agree on guidelines for “look and feel” in designs early in the process. By enabling more collaborative workflows, we’re saving designers and engineers time and money on product development cycles.
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Q: What are your plans for the future? Do you have any new features in the pipeline?
A: We have been extremely focused on our current customers. With the rise of the remote working environment for design studios across the transportation industry, several of our customers are re-evaluating what working from home looks like. When we’re thinking about our future plans, we’re thinking about how we can help our customers design their products without having their teams together in one location to brainstorm and ideate. We have extended our support for the broader design community with the deployment of real time collaboration features to our individual professional design users. We will offer free trials and increased collaboration functionality, expanding the benefits of Gravity Sketch to smaller design studios.
In terms of some of the features we are looking to add:
○ Expanding our offering with a monthly pricing tier for SMB customers
○ Launching web browser collaboration tools
○ Enabling 2D screen support, so teams can join a virtual collaboration session from VR, iPad, or Desktop
○ Diversifying the hardware that we support, and bringing a standalone version of our tools to Web, desktop, and mobile. As VR has yet to be widely adopted across the design industry, this will enable us to meet the design community where they currently are, and expose them to 3D sketching in a slightly more conventional way. Our standalone desktop Wacom tablet version will also arrive within the year – we see an opportunity to deliver a great 3D sketching experience through 2D input, and our focus is on delivering a user-centric and collaborative design development approach.
